DOJ probe opens divides with Hill, CIA

President Barack Obama has long said he wanted to look forward, not backward, when it came to investigating Bush-era interrogation policies – but his good friend, Attorney General Eric Holder, went ahead anyway Monday.

The immediate reaction to Holder’s announcement suggested the investigation will be politically divisive, drive down Obama’s stock at the CIA and almost certainly re-open an uncomfortable question for the White House: just how far is Obama willing to go to extract information from terror suspects?

Several Democrats cheered Holder’s announcement of a preliminary investigation – then immediately insisted he didn’t go far enough. The chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees kept up their calls for a “truth commission” into Bush-era practices.

Others said veteran federal prosecutor John Durham must have free rein to target any potential wrongdoing, even if it takes him to the most senior levels of the Bush administration.

“I applaud the Attorney General for this first step. But, we must go further,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said. “Seeking out only the low-level actors in a conspiracy to torture detainees will bring neither justice nor restored standing to our nation.”

At the same time, a number of Republican senators warned Holder that Durham’s investigation has the potential to spiral into a witch hunt that could hamstring the CIA.

“History has shown that special prosecutors. . .often take an expansive view of their investigative authority,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and eight others wrote to Holder. “Despite your assurances that this investigation will be narrow and focused, there is a real risk that today's announcement portends a long, arduous, and unpredictable process for the intelligence community.”

And reaction from the intelligence community was swift, and largely negative. CIA Director Leon Panetta tried to pre-empt the Holder announcement – and the release of CIA investigative report on some of the most egregious abuses – with a statement seeking to bolster morale at Langley. Durham is already investigating the CIA’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano echoed some of Obama’s forward-not-back language in pledging to cooperate with the investigation. “The CIA’s primary focus remains, as the American people expect, the present and the future, not the past,” he said.

Holder insisted he intended no disrespect to intelligence officials working under “difficult and dangerous circumstances,” but there was every indication that his move further undermined the Obama administration’s standing at CIA headquarters – just months after a bitter split between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the agency over interrogation briefings.

“This is a political act….It’s awful, just awful” said Vince Cannistraro, who headed CIA counterterrorism efforts in the early 1990s. “There’s a lot of sadness among the professionals that have been doing this…They’re scaring the hell out of people. A lot of people are going to just retire.”

Cannistraro said he viewed many of the extreme techniques, such as waterboarding, as unhelpful and unwise, at least in retrospect. But he said it was “stupid” to expose people to criminal liability for excesses such as trying to frighten a detainee by staging a mock execution in another room.

“There were a lot of stupid things done, no question about it, but do you want to prosecute them for doing the same kind of thing you saw on TV in a drama?” the former CIA official said. “We are now forgetting why they were doing what they were doing. Whether it was right or wrong is another question.”

Clearly aware of the firestorm he could ignite, Holder offered a litany of public assurances to try to limit the political fire and fallout.

He stressed that the inquiry was preliminary in nature and might not trigger a full-blown investigation. He reiterated that the inquiry would be restricted to incidents involving a limited number of specific detainees. He said that those who relied in good faith on legal guidance about what was and wasn’t permissible would not be placed in “legal jeopardy.” And he emphasized that he personally would make the final decision about whether to conduct a full-scale investigation.

Also yesterday, Holder released a once-heavily redacted CIA inspector’s general’s report from 2004 that laid out some of the most egregious abuses of the interrogation program – as if to show the American people that what he wanted to investigate was so outrageous it had to be re-examined, even though prosecutors already considered and passed up the cases under the Bush administration.